According to a column by its "public editor" (aka ombudsman, or official busybody), the New York Times has been asking itself whether it does enough to distinguish between fact and opinion in its pages. A "newsroom committee on credibility" looked into the matter and decided that what was needed was a "news/opinion divide committee". The nine lucky editors on this committee "worked for months" to come up with a new system for helping Times readers who can't figure out that "President Bush flew to Texas yesterday" is a fact, whereas "President Bush is a bozo" is an opinion.

No Times reporter would ever dare write that President Bush is a bozo, anyway. What he or she would write is that according to a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, President Bush is a bozo. Or that according to sources deep within the administration, who spoke only on the condition that they not be identified, President Bush is a bozo. And that turns the contention back into a fact - I mean, it's a fact that the guy did say it - so it may still appear unmolested by a lot of graphic semaphores.

And think again: "President Bush is a bozo" actually is a fact, or a factual contention, once we agree on a definition of "bozo," which isn't hard if we are honest. You know what it means. One of the people best able to judge whether Bush is a bozo is the journalist who has been watching his every remark and gesture. Yet the reporter's views on the subject are supposed to be banned from the very newspaper that has paid him or her to acquire them. Either that or he or she must wear a yellow armband reading "opinion" in order to warn readers away.

This exercise by the nation's most distinguished newspaper rests on the dubious double premise that opinions are inherently bad - dangerous, irresponsible, unpatriotic - but that their dire effects can be neutralised by simply labelling them as opinions. What are you supposed to do with the information that what you are about to read is an opinion? Presumably this is not a pre-emptive excuse for factual errors. Opinions should be accurate, just like facts. Are these "Caution: Opinion Ahead" warnings like the warning labels on cigarettes, intended to scare you away? If opinions are that dreadful, why are newspapers even wasting ink on the filthy things? On the other hand, if a simple "Warning: Opinion Ahead" is enough to neutralise this danger, whatever it is, why not just label the whole newspaper as "opinion" and be done with it? The answer is that this obviously won't satisfy the people who accuse newspapers of trafficking in opinions. You can't blame newspapers entirely for being afraid of these people, since they include some of the most deeply, if not violently, opinionated people in the world. It's not inadequately labelled opinions that these people don't like. It's not even opinions in general. It's opinions they disagree with.

But back to the New York Times. Rather than labelling everything or nothing as an opinion, the Times has chosen to come up with a complex set of signals, classifying its various articles with subtle, scholastic distinctions that would impress a medieval monk. The public editor, however, finds them inadequate. Columns and reviews, for example, will carry the author's byline above the name of the column, rather than the more traditional below. Articles that fall somewhere between opinion and reporting will have the name of the feature centered over the headline of the article. (Are you following all this? There will be a quiz at the end of this, er, column, er, article, er, whatever it is.) All articles that are not "straight news" will be published in ragged-right text format. These changes will apply to sections that run every day, but not to sections that run every week, because ... well, I couldn't quite follow the reason.

These reforms, while a good start, are inadequate. In order to ensure that the public will remain utterly befuddled, more pointless distinctions, mystifying labels, and arbitrary design elements are badly needed. Here are a few of them:

A book review should carry a logo of a closed book. A book essay should display a book opened to page 252, if it is shorter than 400 pages, and to page 551 if it is longer than that.

If an article contains an anecdote involving either a dog or an animal with cloven hooves in the first three paragraphs, it should be labelled as a "Commentary," whereas if it mentions the United Nations anywhere in the body of the piece it is a "News Analysis." If it is a parody, it must be labelled "Parody" in order to kill the joke and assure that no one will think that it is funny.

Columns on the op-ed page should be labelled as "Columns" whereas columns elsewhere in the paper should be labelled "Second-Rate Columns."

Opinion pieces in support of the war on Iraq should include a logo featuring a smiley face emoticon. Opponents of the war should have the same logo, upside down.

Our goal is to tell the reader everything he or she could possibly want to know about an article before he or she troubles to read it. Or to be able to chat knowingly about it at a cocktail party the evening it is published without having read it at all.